Advertising

iRobot, the company that makes Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, has agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion, according to a joint statement. If the deal closes, Amazon will have access to the maps a Roomba makes of each room it cleans. Continue Reading →

Back in June '21, Kim Kardashian shilled Ethereum Max on Instagram. When I learned about it, I wrote, “I’ve just become aware of the best example of everything that is bad (and hopefully temporary) about crypto-insanity.” Continue Reading →

First-party cookies are important. They help web publishers customize your experience. Third-party cookies are important for advertisers – and Google wants them gone. Continue Reading →

At a dinner party the other night, a very accomplished business person told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their conversations. “I was talking to my wife about a pair of designer shoes that she wanted to purchase, and not 10 minutes later while she was doing some online research for work, she saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. She hadn’t searched for the shoes; the ad just appeared. Clearly, our computers or our phones are listening.” Some people nodded in agreement, and others began to chime in. Continue Reading →

The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act was introduced Thursday by a group of key senators on the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust: the ranking member and chair, Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. If passed, the bipartisan bill would force Google to break up its ad business. Continue Reading →

As you know, there are only three business models: I pay, you pay, or someone else pays. While everyone says they hate commercials, ad-supported business models simply refuse to die. Why? "Free" (aka "someone else pays") is very compelling for both consumers and shareholders. So compelling, in fact, that our friends at Netflix are looking to introduce their lower-priced ad-supported tier by the end of the year. Continue Reading →

Instagram will now let all users tag products in their posts. The feature is rolling out to users in the U.S. today. Continue Reading →

Have you ever been talking about a particular pair of shoes or handbag with a friend, only to suddenly see ads for that exact product pop up on Facebook and on Google? It must mean your phone is spying on you! Right? Wrong! Shelly Palmer talks with Bianca Peters and Raegan Medgie about predictive analytics and what's really happening. Continue Reading →

In partnership with Shopify, TikTok is adding in-app shopping. What does that have to do with tapping on Jennifer Aniston's sweater? Continue Reading →

With the full understanding that killing 3rd-party cookies in its very popular Chrome browser would impact practically every advertiser, Google, the world's largest seller of advertising, offered its idea of a replacement: FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). To make a long story short, practically everyone but Google hates the idea. Continue Reading →